Sunday, May 09, 2010

Living in New York City: thegrowlingwolf Looks at His Mom

[Totally reedited edition]
Foto by tgw, Coney Island, 2010
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Thinking of Mom
Let's see...what's the first thing I think of when I think of Mom? With me it's Philip Wylie's book Generation of Vipers in which Brother Wylie blames most of our post-World War II ills on what he calls "Momism."

Chapter XI: Common Women

MOM* IS THE END PRODUCT OF SHE.

She is Cinderella, the creature I discussed earlier, the shining-haired, the starry-eyed, the ruby-lipped virgo aeternis, of which there is presumably one, and only one, or a one-and-only for each male, whose dream is fixed upon her deflowerment and subsequent perpetual possession. This act is a sacrament in all churches and a civil affair in our society. The collective aspects of marriage are thus largely compressed into the rituals and social perquisites of one day. Unless some element of mayhem or intention of divorce subsequently obtrudes, a sort of privacy engulfs the union and all further developments are deemed to be the business of each separate pair, including the transition of Cinderella into mom, which, if it occasions any shock, only adds to the huge, invisible burden every man carries with him into eternity. It is the weight of this bundle which, incidentally, squeezes out of him the wish for death, his last positive biological resource.

Mom is an American creation. Her elaboration was necessary because she was launched as Cinderella.

(Reference: www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/momism.html)
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My Mom was no Cinderella. She wasn't a fairy tale to me. She was real. But she did try and ruin my life. Purposely? As a kid I imagined such. As a kid she represented authority. She was stronger than my father. Most of the jokes in the family about my father had to do with him being henpecked. That word did seem to fit him except the hen part doesn't fit my mother. My mother wasn't a mother hen; she was a mother survivor.

My mother was already 34 when I first remember her. Where she had once been small and bouncy, after I was born she kept on her gained weight from the pregnancy and for the rest of her life she fought trying to lose that weight which had settled around her middle and in her thighs and bottom. My mother wasn't ugly but that poking out stomach and that large rear end took away any sexual attraction I should have Freudianly had for her. I never saw my mother naked. I once saw her in her bra and panties but it turned me off because her panties had a big hole in them over her ass. Am I speaking of my mother in disrespectful terms? I probably am. I don't ever remember respecting her. That's a cold fact and I shouldn't be writing about this on what is Momism Day...er-ah, I'm sorry, Mother's Day. But the fact is: due to me not being turned on sexually by my mother caused me to reject her. I grew up separating myself from her; getting as far away and as secretly distant from her as I could get. I became my own mother.

I remember my mother bathing me. And, yes, to me then bathing was sexual. I remember always getting erections when I took a bath. My mother always bathed me. Never my father. Come on, to my father, bathing the baby was a woman's duty. When I got erections when my mother bathed me, I thought they were silly and laughed about them, proudly poking them up out of the bathwater to impress my mom. "What a big boy am I!" Her response was cool. Rather asexual. Once she slapped it down, but most of the time she simply instructed me that what was happening was natural but nasty, too. She further theologized that those things weren't anything to be proud of. She further theologized by departing to me motherly instructions on how tucking it between my thighs and squeezing them hard against my dick would quickly relieve me of that "sinful moment." Anything nasty was of course sinful to my mother. My born-again mother.

I also remember my mother giving me enemas. She used her big red rubber douche bag--we called it THE hot water bottle--to execute those enemas on me. I remember how she first removed the big douche nozzle that was normally on the bag and replaced it with the smaller enema nozzle. The she filled the bag with hot water from the faucet, bent me over the toilet bowl, stuck that nozzle up my little butt, unlocked the metal gizmo that kept the hot water from flowing, and soon, I, scared to death and screaming my antithesis to this action, felt that hot water flooding up my ass into my bowels and soon I felt full as a blimp and yelling for my mother to mercifully pull it out and stop the flow--and she would and then I'd hit the bowl with a mighty lunge and a loosed blast of hot water and turds...WHEW. And, yes, I did feel miraculously better after that, though I hated it all the way up until I was almost a teenager when one day my father took over and told me from then on I had to either stop getting constipated or else give myself my own enemas. I was too big for mother to do it any longer. You know what? I have never been constipated since. Since that fatherly advice, I have simply refused to get constipated because I outgrew the need for my mother to give them to me. The sexual need. It's Freudian, I know, but that's what it was. I was trying to fall in love with my mother by teasing her sexually. She rejected that aspect of my primitive love and it warped our relationship from then on. After my mother stopped bathing me and giving me enemas, I became my own keeper, my own mother, my own father, because, don't worry, I had no more respect for my father than I did for my mother.

Now I'm a far distance down the road from those days. My mother has long since gone on to I hope that glory she so sold her life in bondage to after she lost her second child and flipped out and over into the arms of this superman Jesus.

However, as a result of my mother rejecting me sexually, and this is one of those ironies I so love to bite into the belly of, it seems I've been relegated to go through life seeking sex from mothers. Most of them other men's wives (same as my mother was another man's wife). But even after one of these divorced her husband, she was still a mother.

I've known some very fine mothers. Growing up certain of my friends's mothers had made me envious. But, and here comes Freud again, in most instances, and especially one, I had a strong sexual attraction for those mothers.

I have tried to love mothers all my life, but, and here's the monkey wrench in the works, I have never been able to get love back from these mothers. Sex yes. Plenty of good and bad sex, but no real love. I suppose to them I'm like a manchild. Having me as a lover is exciting but having me as a child is deplorable to them.

No mother, even my own mother, likes what I turned out to be in terms of a son.

So, there, I've revealed myself as a victim of what Wylie called Momism. My mother just didn't know how to work the use of her Momism powers on me.

Did I ever give my mother a Mother's Day card or present? One time. One Mother's Day my father took me out back of the house and said I was going to buy my mother something this Mother's Day since I had a job and had my own money, by God, and he threatened to punch my lights out if I didn't.

I drove around town for about an hour wondering just what the hell to buy my mother for Mother's Day. My mother hated most mother things. She hated perfume. She hated flimsy stuff like nightgowns or peignoirs. She even hated pajamas and bathrobes. What else was there for a son to buy his mom? A mom he knew nothing about. Nothing about her likes or dislikes. Nothing about her dreams. Nothing about her expectations, except those that related to her desire to see me become a "minister of the Holy Spirit." Nothing about her own ambitions when she was a young woman. Nothing about her except she was my mom according to this birth certificate she kept in a lock box in her bedroom closet. I ended up going to a drugstore and having a Cherry Coke and with the money I had left, I bought my mom a box of chocolate-covered cherries. I presented it to her at the dinner table that night. "Happy Mother's Day, Mother." She opened it, looked at me with a frown on her face, and said, "You know how you hate getting chocolate-covered cherries for Christmas? Figure it out." With that, she pitched my box of chocolate-covered cherries into the kitchen garbage. Then she went into the bathroom to cry.

My brother knew my mother better than I did, so I'll let him tell you about her. Here's what he wrote about her:

"My mother inherited all the wrong parts of her past to ever be unconcernedly happy. From her grandmother...she got a dour and pessimistic outlook as well as an inability to accept physical love or emotions as a normal part of life. Secretly romantic, she could never equate affection--especially on the part of her husband--with true love. She wanted to hold people close to her but not touch them."

Wow, that describes me, too. Hey, I'm kin to that woman and I'm kin to that son writing about her, too. We even write alike.

So that's what my mother means to me. She spewed me out of her womb and let me experience this fascinating thing we human monkeys call life and living and existence. It's temporary. And temporary is a good word. Temporary easily describes everything including mothers. I hold no animosity against my mother. I never loved her. No. And, no, I never thought of her as a saint. My mother seemed happiest when she was rid of me. She encouraged me to be by myself. "Go to your room and leave me alone." That's the best advice my mother ever gave me. On that advice, I grew up in my own private room--that room was more a mother to me than my mother.

She tried like hell to avoid confrontations with me. When I was very young she avoided confrontations by saying "Wait until your father gets home." And when dad got home and mother passed her confrontational problem with me onto him, the only way he knew to handle it was the macho-father way, via his belt or razor strop. So when I was young and provoked my mother to the point of trying to beat my little smart ass with hedge limbs or peach tree "switches"--to impose some discipline on me--it ended with me getting a beating from the old man. Those beatings only provoked me to further provoke my mother into another confrontation--thus another beating from my father...UNTIL, one day when my father came in to beat my ass on mother's orders, I, who by then was a big boy, near 180, with shoulders like a mule's, grabbed my old man by the arm and slung him back into my bedroom wall and I thereby and then declared myself no longer a child but now a man who could whip my father's ass--and who now could further provoke my mother--provoke her maybe to the cracking point.

Now I look back on my mother with much more respect. That's because I can now feel her inside me. I'm just now realizing how much of her I am and was and have always been. That's why I said after I offered my brother's writing about my mother that he could have been writing about me, too. Yes, I'm still mostly my father, but my serious side is my mother's side. I love to read--constantly. My father never read any other book in his life except the Holy Bible. He read the newspaper from front to back every day, but I never remember seeing my dad ever reading a book. My brother and I both very early revealed our artistic talents, he via writing, me via the piano, both of us eventually making our professional livings off our editorial and journalistic talents, both of us, too, eventually becoming published writers. So that came through my mother's genes. My father, though not a dumb man, never wrote anything in his life. I don't remember ever getting a letter from my dad. My mother, yes, but never my dad. Don't get me wrong, my father wasn't a dumbass, he was a stone wit, a very funny man, with a charming way that could convince any wide-eyed romantic via tall tale and suggestion that he had mastered several degrees at Harvard..."or was it Yale?" he might add, giving the comedic impression he really couldn't remember which Ivy League higher learning institute he'd actually attended.

Here's my brother's final word on our Mother:

"...she was a good mother, warmer than I have drawn and more generous than one might suppose. She weighed everything, it is true, but she was content with little in return. Her main drawbacks as a person were from the circumstances of her life, I am convinced. Had she not quit school and married so young, had she not been born and rigorously reared in strict religious fundamentalism, had she lived in some other part of the country, had she been the daughter of a wealthy family, had she not married my father--the list is long and maybe beside the point, but I feel she could and probably would have been a female for the history books...for she knew how to use whatever she had, whether materials at hand or spiritual and mental resources, and she had a zeal for order and control."

Those powers impressed my brother but they didn't impress me. All I can say, she must have been a superMom to have contributed two such brilliant sons to this mean old world.

thelovingandkindgrowlingwolf
for The Mother's Day Edition of The Daily Growler

A The Daily Growler Orange Alert: The head of the FCC is about to give into the corporate broadband providers (Verizon, AT&T (both still part of the old Ma Bell system),
Comcast, Time-Warner...name your favorite) and allow them to put speed limits and toll booths on the Internet. He's caving in to allowing these crooks to put into being their original idea that was batted down by Congress every time it came up--the idea of charging rates according to broadband coverage and speeds. But a recent ruling by a Federal judge (appointed by G.W. "Now Reconstructing Haiti in His Image" Bush) has said the FCC can no longer rule against our too-big-to-fail communications corporations--our broadband providers.

The Plutocratic motto is: stockholders, speculators, Capitalist pigs: THE POWER ELITE before the common ordinary man and woman citizen, the individuals! The Plutocracy is against INDIVIDUALS--it is for TEAM PLAYERS...and, yes, though it's joked about in the daily conversation of the ultra-dumb American public...like, "One day these god-damn corpse-o'rations is gonna be votin' in our elections jest like they's me. When they votes does they votes as one?" But it's not a joke. Yes, corporations already try and control how their staffs vote. But certainly in the future they certainly will control huge blocs of votes by simply ordering their TEAM PLAYERS to vote a certain way or "good-bye"--TEAM PLAYERS like the true believers who have hooked or crooked their ways to the top big-bonus slots at Goldman-Sachs--those employees who got $400,000-average bonuses after WE the PEOPLE bailed their crooked asses out--I mean these bastards robbed We the People of trillions of dollars! Why doesn't that bother the average dumbass American? And now, laddies and lassies, due to the recent who-knows-who was behind the asinine school-boy antics of this fool silly American citizen by marriage and not birth, this numbskull Pakistan-born...WAIT A MINUTE, I hear the other side shouting me down. They say, "Wolf Man, here you go with your bloody conspiracy bullshit again. Things'll work out. The economy will recover. Goldman-Sachs...hey, those guys are smarter than us. Like we trust God, we've got to trust them. Just being able to figure that stock market out makes 'em geniuses in my eyes...though, it's funny, I've mostly lost money on my investments most of my time in the stock market...in fact because of that recession of, what was it, 2008? 2009?, most of my stock market investments were wiped out. Even my pension fund was almost wiped out. But, still, hey, looks like somebody's gettin' richer than hell off the stock market, so we've gotta stand behind it."

It's not a conspiracy. It's an actuality. Corporations have been trying to take control of this country since the early days of the Industrial Revolution. Since the days of John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Oligarchy; and J.P. Morgan and Colonel Dodge (he wasn't a Colonel in any man's army) and Commodore (he wasn't really a commodore of anything except his wealth) Vanderbilt and Huntington and Stanford out in California and these big moneybags's building with coolies and potato-famine Irishmen and then controlling our railroad system, our shipping, our supply routes, gobbling up acres and acres of public lands as they built their railroads. We the People through Congress gave them right of ways to millions of acres of land in the process--Vanderbilt in running his New York Central Railroad locomotives on wood wiped out thousands of acres of woodlands and forests along the west banks of the Hudson River; and don't forget old good-hearted Andrew Carnegie and U.S. Steel--those railroads needed rails--millions of miles of rails--and COAL! After wiping out the forests of this country in order to supply wood for their wood-burning locomotives (the sparks from the stacks of these wood-burning locomotives also set forest and grass fires all along the ways over the years)--and also wood for the ties that the rails were "tied" to--the railroad industry invested in Kentucky and West Virginia coal mines. Old John D. and Standard Oil went into the coal-mining business in West Virginia--that skinflint old crooked bastard's offspring is still a senator from that state--he was governor--he's done nothing as governor and now senator to control the coal mining industry in West Virginia--hell no, coal is a part contributor to the continuing growth of the many Rockefeller Foundations and Hedge-Fund Pools!

Regardless: watch for your Internet service providers to soon be controlling all aspects of your participation in Internet activities. Like spying on us. AT&T, unless you've forgotten, was the biggest asshole corporation that gladly went along with the Bush Family Empire's desire via executive order to spy on every dumb son of a bitch one of us by collecting and sorting (using keyword logic) through all our e-mails, our phone calls, our blogs, our Websites. Our Supremely Biased Court ruled that the American people couldn't sue poor old too-big-to-fail AT&T for invasion of privacy so they're protected by our Federal courts (FACT: all Federal court judges are appointed by sitting presidents and they are biased in that political-partisan sense).

Watch how it's gradually unveiled how We the People through our Congress (and President) gave British Petroleum a free pass when it came to environmental protection to drill to hell and back at this site that just blew sky high and is probably going to wreck the Alabama-Mississippi-Louisiana Gulf Coast economy for decades to come. British Petroleum executives responsible for this offshore site should be jailed immediately. They obviously had no idea what they were doing at this offshore drilling project. They now are proving they obviously have no idea how to clean up this mess their lousy management of the site caused--and the lousy inspection of Halliburton's obviously faulty concrete collar work--I mean, this well is 5,000-feet deep. You remember how many feet there are in a mile! These bastards were allowed to drill down a mile underwater and then a thousand more feet down into the ocean bed. They hit a fucking gusher, folks--every god-damn oil driller knows gushers go out of control--they're called "Wildcat wells" in the old industry. The Tyler, Texas, minor league baseball team was called the Wildcatters! Wildcatters were once legendary heroes--like the infamous H.L. Hunt. He was a wildcatter. Looking for gushers. When they hit a gusher, like the gold miners of '49, they hollered "EUREKA." As a result of H.L. Hunt's first wildcat drilling site hitting gushers, the town in Arkansas where this old illiterate swindler struck it rich became known as and still is Eureka, Arkansas (and, yes, Eureka, California, came from the wildcat gold miners striking it rich on the Mad River). But, I'll bet you, the BP execs in charge of that offshore platform that blew sky high had never worked on a rig in their lives. But watch, nothing will happen to BP. In fact, they'll be given more drilling rights along the East Coast and in Alaska as a result of President Obama's knowing we are running flat-dab out of oil and his desperation to find more sacred "American" oil since we are having a rough time capturing that Iraq oil we so desperately thought once we got it would pay for all of these latest wars (and right now these wars are running our economy so we can't end them)--and now we're so desperate for oil we're willing to sacrifice clean drinking water! Holy crap, folks. The future looks pretty god-damn bleak for the poor--but pretty damn good for the POWER ELITE. Hey, a young, like 30-ish, Russian billionaire was just allowed to buy the New Jersey Nets basketball team. Isn't anyone curious how a 30-year-old Russian--he's not a very bright guy--he loves basketball--duh!--got his mitts on billions of dollars? Could it be OIL? Could it be black market arms? Could he have terrorist connections? Remember the Chechnyan rebels who blew up the gym in Moscow a few years back? Will they now be coming to Brooklyn, New York, to blow up a Russian asshole's basketball gym? Are Russian billionaires buying American basketball teams investigated? Are they made to show how they made their money? It's American crooks dealing with Russian crooks. And trust me, folks, We the People are dealing with crooks, too--crooks in our Congress, crooks as our bosses, crooks as our doctors, lawyers, and on and on and on.

Just today (Friday) I read Juan Gonzales's article in the NY Daily News as to why banks are heavily investing in these new Capitalist takeovers of our public school system called charter schools. The reason: there's big money to be made in a for-profit school system. We now must start paying big bucks to get educated. One New York City charter school was founded by a big-time hedge-fund player, a friend of Mayor Bloomberg. And Bloomberg thanks to our stupid state legislature has been given control of New York City's PUBLIC school system. This asshole who is a billionaire without a worry in the world, which is what I consistently add when writing about this little rich jerk mayor and his little-man (he's a short people) complex as he like Mussolini (his predecessor, Rudi Guiliani loved Mussolini, too) tries to chest-out and arrogantly work his wormy way up the POWER ELITE ladder to the catbird seat, up there with his fellow billionaires Warren "the Evil Bluffer" Buffett, Senor Slim of Mexico, and Little Billy and Melinda Gates. Think of it, those five people--including Mayor "Lady Killer" Bloomberg--control 200 billion dollars of the world's wealth--and that's just their personal wealth and not the wealth of their corporations and foundations--MicroSoft, Berkshire-Hathaway (heavily invested in toxic derivatives), the Mexican Telephone System, and Bloomberg's Bloomberg L.P., currently run, by the bye, by Dan Doctoroff. Who he? Why he's a former deputy mayor of New York City--under who? Why Little People Mikey Bloomberg. This corporate genius mayor of ours (who lucked into his 63-billion-a-year software/terminal boondoggle) has currently managed to put New York City 8 billion bucks in the hole. His solution to our debt? Higher property and small business taxes. Higher city sales tax (I guarantee you that's coming). Allowing rents to go up and up and up. The glass ceiling's the limit. Continuing to build his billion-dollar mall projects all over the city, just recently opening Williamsburg Park--beautifying the land along the East River over there getting it ready for the Riverfront Development scheme that will soon be constructing hi-rise luxury condos and luxury hotels with fabulous views all along beside that park.

All of New York City is for sale under this mayor. Say, you're a big-time developer pal of the mayor's and your real-estate evaluator team sees a piece of property or a block of real estate they say is prime for development, and Mayor Bloomberg will use his right of eminent domain, claim the area you want to develop is a blighted area, and soon you are leveling a block of affordable housing and business space and replacing it with a hi-rise luxury condo where the top floor apartments with the "precious" views will sell for millions of bucks--and the affordable units that have no views will sell for $2000-a-month!

CROOKS. All of 'em are CROOKS. To deal with crooks, WE the People must develop our own crookedness. Stop paying taxes. Take all our money out of big banks and start our own community banks. Anybody can start a bank. And like don't buy products made in Commie China. And like don't keep electing millionaires to political office. In fact, quit voting. Let the idiots vote. Let the country go to the idiots. Start our own country! How about We the People of the USA commit an en masse takeover this country, rename it, write a new constitution.... What a dreamer I am? A fool for being so, too, I'll admit it, though on the other hand I can proudly say, my mother didn't raise no fool. You'll see.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler.

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